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had returned to live in Ben’s shadow—which, Adam thought now, was likely Ben’s intention. Ben had held out a poisoned chalice, and his older brother had taken it. Even in that last fateful summer, when Adam had tipped the balance of their rivalry, he knew that the fault line in his life had cracked open before his birth. And now he had come back.
    Adam became aware of his long silence. “You’re right,” he told his uncle. “I’ve been away a long time now. I remember him as he was.”
    Jack gave him a probing look. “Why did you leave?” he asked. “You changed the entire course of your life, cut off your father, and wouldn’t say why. It was like you were too proud to tell us.”
    The tacit accusation stung. But Adam had no desire to explain his reasons, and Jack no right to know them. “Maybe I just got sick of him.”
    Jack raised his eyebrows. “Enough to shun him for a decade?”
    “Yes. That much.”
    The laconic rebuff, hard for Adam to deliver, had the unexpected result of softening Jack’s expression. “He got no better, Adam. Sometimes I found myself wishing that, like you, I’d stayed away.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    Jack’s shoulders slumped, as if the weight of his reasons was too great to express. “This was home,” he said simply.
    Adam felt a rush of affection, accompanied by the fervent wish that he could respect his uncle fully. Perhaps Ben had stamped Adam with his own harsh judgment, but he could not quell his verdict on Jack’s life: You should have left. Instead, Adam said, “Then there’s my mother. Why on earth did he marry her, and why did he stay?”
    It was telling, Adam realized, that he did not ask why his mother had married Benjamin Blaine. As it was, the question made Jack frown. “The first part is easy enough to answer. At Ben’s core was this raging anger that he was born into this stunted family, with no money or accomplishment. He was deeply ashamed of that, and of our parents. The shame deepened when the summer people came, enjoying their affluence and success. To scrape together some money Ben and I started working as waiters at their parties, serving them cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then cleaning up the careless mess they made.”
    “That’s how they met, right?”
    Jack nodded. “For years, he watched your mother, the beautiful daughter of a family who took their lives for granted. No one knew that later on her father’s investment firm, his inheritance, would collapse under claims of mismanagement.” Jack’s smile was brief and mirthless. “‘Inbreeding,’ Ben told me once. ‘The Barkleys’ blood got thin, until everything her father had he owed to ancestors with more brains and balls.’”
    The echo of his father’s scorn re-ignited Adam’s anger. “It didn’t keep the sonofabitch from marrying the old man’s daughter.”
    “Clarice was a prize to be won,” Jack replied, “a symbol of all he wanted and never had. For a passing moment, I thought he was after your mother’s best friend, Whitney Dane. But once Ben left Yale, it was his time to go after her. She never had a chance—the triumph of capturing her was too great for Ben to fail.” Jack’s tone grew hard. “So he pursued her, married her, and cheated on her. The ultimate proof of his superiority was that he made her parents’ home his own. And now he’s taken that piece of her life and given it to this actress.”
    Feeling the chill of this story and its coda, Adam shut his eyes. Another moment with his father came to him, again from their final summer. Jenny was off-island, and Adam had asked Ben to go fly-fishing off Dogfish Bar. With a rueful smile, Ben shook his head. “Believe me, son, I’d vastly prefer your company to the living death I’ll experience tonight. But your mother insists on going to some idiot’s Fourth of July party. For reasons that are obscure to me, she actually cares about what these people think.” Ben sat back in his chair, his tone